I based the town of Bliss on a southeastern Michigan farming community called Blissfield. As a child I visited the family farm there once or twice a year. I have rich and happy memories of wandering around the barns, cartwheeling my way across the vast yard, and riding on an old tractor with my Grandma Pearl’s cousin Gerald Seegert.
For this city girl, my days on that farm were magical and I look back on those visits as some of my favorite memories.
Someone else lives in the house now, the land parceled out long ago. Grandma Pearl and her cousin Gerald have been gone for a long time. But what I have are those memories. This novel recaptures part of my childhood.